Show Time!

The Washington International Film Festival is in process and we have signed up to see about six movies. We have seen three so far.

Usually, we scour the festival’s publicity material to determine exactly which movies we want to see. This year, we did it differently. The festival plays at various venues. We chose to only see movies playing at the Avalon, since it is close to the house, and parking is usually pretty easy. That made it easier to decide which movies to see (the Avalon seems to show four movies a day on its two screens).

On Tuesday, we saw a double feature, “Roming” and “Unfinished Stories”, and last night we saw “Mon Colonel”. A night off tonight, and then we go back on Thursday.

“Roming” is a Czech movie that tells the story of a gypsy (Roma) family in transition. We who are not gypsies have trouble understanding gypsies, nomads who are not agriculturalists, families who have traditionally considered themselves outside the law, musicians who don’t like to take baths, fortune tellers who are scam artists but somehow still know how to tell fortunes…..I don’t know exactly, but these are the common thoughts, aren’t they?

Well, in “Roming”, you learn that the gypsies are having a hard time understanding themselves these days. Our young hero is an engineering student in Prague, giving no outward sign of his gypsy heritage. His father lives in a Soviet style apartment complex, drinking vodka and trying to write the great gypsy epic (he thinks an epic is what the gypsy needs to ground himself in his own ethnic identity). His uncle (gypsy caricature through and through) comes to take father and son on a road trip, to a town where the extended family lives and where an 18 year old girl lives who the father had betrothed to the son 17 years earlier (the son having no clue of this, of course). The uncle wants to sleep under the stars; the son brings a fancy tent; you get the picture. And all the while, the father writes his epic, and the story shifts from the father-uncle-son story to the epic story until they intertwine, and realty becomes unreality and vice versa. A pleasing and funny movie. But what do the gypsies think about it?

Then came “Unfinished Stories”, which I thought was a great movie, but E. hated. It is Iranian, takes place during one very cold winter night in Tehran, and is the first part of a story of three different women: a young girl whose parents have forbade her continuing to see her boyfriend and who, at least for a while, decides not to come home; a woman who goes to an all night pharmacy to take a pregnancy test and who husband has kicked her out of the house because she was not ‘careful’; and a young woman who has just given birth in a hospital, but whose husband was jailed on some unimportant charge, but whose disappearance makes it impossible for her to pay the hospital bill, which is necessary if she is going to be able to keep her baby. They meet various men (a soldier, a policeman, a taxi driver) who help them as best they can (which is not always very much), one story morphs into another, and none of the stories are resolved. E. tells me that resolution is important to her; as for me, I like to end the stories myself. I thought this movie was terrific.

Last night, I gave the lowest score possible to a new French movie, “Mon Colonel”. We met a friend at the theater who was raving about it; thought it could not have been better. It is Algeria in the mid-1950s, and the French are trying to pacify a village (city) in one of the three provinces of a country then thought of as an integral part of France. A young lieutenant becomes the aide-de-camp to a rather brusk, no-foolishness colonel, who thinks he is fighting a war against terror, and that to fight such a war you need to reek terror on the terrorists. Eventually, the lieutenant breaks down, and either commits suicide or his done away with by the colonel (“missing in action” is the official verdict). But not before the lieutenant writes up his story and has it sent to his father by a French Algerian teacher, who for years forgot he had the manuscript. The father of the dead soldier (who turns out to be Charles Aznavour) reads the manuscript and kills the now retired and elderly colonel. The movie is the story of the search for the colonel’s murderer, based upon the authorities’ review of the lieutenant’s manuscript, which the father has sent in pieces (to guarantee attention).

Cecille de France is one of the nicest French actresses to watch (Remember “Avenue Montaigne”?). She plays Lt. Galois (not the cigarette) and is charged with reading the manuscript. The movie goes from her sitting in full color at a desk, with tears in her eyes, to black and white flashbacks to Algeria in the 50s. I was embarrassed for her.

I thought the movie pretty awful, about as trite as can be. Algeria? Read Iraq. Read the Israeli Occupied Territories. Read wherever you want. They took a good story, and they muddied it all up.

A Chelm Story

1.  Chelm, a town in eastern Poland, became the butt of Yiddish humor as the home of dimwits who could do nothing right.

2.  Isaac Beshevis Singer wrote a number of Chelm Stories.

3.  Robert Brustein took one of them and created a “folk musical” called Schlemiel the First, which was performed this year at Theater J.

4.  In Schlemiel the First, the lead character, Schlemiel the First, is a young (and dim witted) fellow who is sent by the town elders to visit other communities and tell them how wonderful Chelm is.

5.  By theatrical device, his directions get turned around and he winds up back in Chelm, thinking he is elsewhere.

6.  He is surprised that the town he is visiting is also called Chelm, looks the same as his own Chelm, and even has a woman who looks like his wife and two children who look like his children.  He cannot wait to return to Chelm and tell them about the other Chelm.

7.  My cousin (by marriage) Ed’s family originally came from Chelm.  To some extent, he says, it seemed appropriate.

8.  Last weekend, I met a cousin of my cousin (by marriage) Ed, and we were talking about his (for his, you can read either my cousin (by marriage)’s or his cousin’s) family and how they came from Chelm and how funny that was, and about I.B. Singer and Robert Brustein and all that.

9.  To which my cousin (by marriage)’s cousin says to me:  “My grandmother didn’t come from that Chelm.  She came from another Chelm, a smaller town south of Cracow.”

10.  So, I say to myself, you have to be kidding?  Who’s right?  Was his mother simply trying to hide the shame of it all, or was she telling the truth? Did the Chelm south of Cracow look like the Chelm further north?  Could Schlemiel the First have been telling the truth after all?

If at first, you don’t succeed….

Melinda Beck’s article in today’s Wall Street Journal is an interesting discussion of self-esteem and self-efficacy, which I won’t try to paraphrase.  But some of the incidents she describes are instructive by themselves:

Julie Andrews was turned down on her first screen test, as being insufficiently photogenic.  Harry Potter was turned down by 12 publishers.  Decca Records refused the Beatles.  Walt Disney was fired for having insufficient imagination.  Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team as a sophomore.  Dr. Seuss was rejected 27 times.

The question is: why do some people give up when rejected, and others keep going?  She ends with a quote from Henry Ford: “Whether you think you can or you can’t, you’re usually right.”

The Wright Stuff?

OK, I listened to Pastor Wright’s speech before the NAACP last night and his speech at the Press Club this morning.  They were both excellent and well delivered.

But…then it was time for questions from the audience.  Well, not from the audience directly, but from questions previously (before the speech) handed to the moderator.  The questions were primarily softball and simpleminded, but they covered a broad range of areas.  Wright answered each with only one or two sentences.  But they weren’t one or two sentences meant to be helpful, but rather meant to demean the listener (“You have never heard my sermons, have you, so how can you ask that question?”), to show how smart he was, and how above it all.  Smirking at people in the audience, rolling his eyes or raising his eyebrows, saying things that will most certainly become today’s and tomorrow’s sound bites as if to taunt his hosts, the media, Rev. Wright, for all the power and truths in much of what he says, proved that humility is not part of his Christianity.  That is really too bad.

Wright and Wrong

Reverend Wright is speaking here 25 minutes from now at the National Press Club.  I am going to watch him on C-Span.  According to this morning’s Washington Post, “The Miami Beach-based Jewish group Shalom International plans to demonstrate against Wright outside of the press club.  Bob Kunst, the group’s president, called Wright a “racist” and warned “There’s going to be a major, major breakaway in the Democratic Party of Obama is nominated.”

Shalom International is a “never again” group that likes to protest and make things uncomfortable for anyone who disagrees with their right wing approach to Jewish affairs.  Sometimes they are on the correct side of an issue; sometimes they are totally off the wall, and an embarrassment.  This is a case of the latter.

If Shalom International wants to protest against the pope because there is still some anti-Jewish material in church dogma, or because there has not been sufficient repudiation of the church’s horrific past, so be it.  If they want to take a political position on Israel’s foreign policy, OK, they don’t matter anyway. If they want to stage protest rallies contra proto-Nazi rallies, more power to them.

But to protest against Reverend Wright and Obama?  “Off the wall” is not sufficiently descriptive.

Shalom, indeed.

Jeremiah Wright

A week or so ago, I listened to Pastor Wright’s 2003 sermon in which he repeatedly said “God damn America”.  It is available on the internet.  I heard an audio version; I don’t know if there is a video.

I had a couple of reactions.  One was, “this is a little over the top”.  The other was, “this guy is quite an orator”. And the second sentiment predominated.  This was a lengthy sermon, ranging over a number of topics, most of which dealt with various forms of social justice and human responsibility.  It ranged from soft tones (“now listen carefully or you might miss something”) to absolute bombasts.  You could have scored it with “allegros” and “lentos”, “crescendos” and “glissandos”.

Of course, history is filled with powerful orators, many of whom have (as the NYT now famously described Wright) “wackadoodle” qualities.  Farrakhan is a powerful orator, but much of what he says is nonsense.  Hitler was a powerful orator, and we know what his talent at speaking led to.

But Wright does not strike me as a Farrakhan, or as a Hitler, or as a “wackadoodle”.  He also doesn’t strike me as a fundamentalist theologian who uses his oratory to scare his flock with the possibility of eternal damnation.  He strikes me as a very (emphasize ‘very’) smart man, with a congregation whose members include many who have been dealt a rough blow in life and need buoying up from time to time.  And a man, who finds his mission in helping those congregants with a large agenda of social programming meant to hold a troubled neighborhood together.

And, yes, I guess his sermons can go over the top.  But, except for this thrice repeated line, there really was nothing over the top about this sermon.  It was highly critical, not of American, but of the American government and its support of countries and institutions that we might be much better off if we opposed.  And he asked, as did the biblical prophets, how a God could bless such a nation.  As the Jeremiahs of old railed against the waywardness of Israel, so did this Jeremiah rail against the waywardness of the Bush administration.  And as the prophets of old warned of punishments, so did the prophet of 2003, speaking, as did Malcolm X, of “chickens coming home to roost”.

You can agree with him; you can disagree with him.  But the sermon was intelligent and thought provoking.  And the Barack Obamas of his congregation might listen to him and say “oh, boy, here he goes again” (but don’t we all do that with our clergymen?), but not necessarily “I am out of here”.

So, who is kicking up all of this dirt, and who is projecting the presumed sins of Wright onto Obama?  Yes, maybe the media.  And, yes, maybe Hillary and her increasingly motley crew.  But most of them, I suppose, are those bitter small minded people, who gravitate to their guns and religion, that Obama talked about.  His comment was right on, you know, and his wording was right on as well, with only one exception.  These bitter bigots are not only located in the small towns of Pennsylvania.  They are everywhere.  And, to complete the circle, it is their existence which requires to Rev. Wright to pontificate as he does.

So it goes…..

Mother Teresa and Justinian Were Both From Skopje

Who knew?

I attended a lunch time lecture at the Smithsonian on Macedonia.  Not sure why, but it just seemed like the thing to do.  The lecturer was an art historian who is from there, but who now lives here.  She had 60 minutes, but took 75, and that was rushing.  This is the first time she gave a lecture on Macedonia, and tried to both retell its history, and take us on a tour.  Most of the pictures, she said, she got off Flickr.

Macedonia was, of course, the southernmost province of Yugoslavia, and has been independent since 1991.  Historic Macedonia, however, covers a portion of northern Greece larger than today’s Republic, as well as smaller parts of Bulgaria and Albania.  The Greeks believe that true Macedonia is within Greece and has convinced the UN to admit Macedonia only under the name of The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.  Imagine my surprise, therefore, to learn that our sizable audience included representatives of both the Greek and the Macedonian embassies.

Macedonia was of a piece when it was part of the Ottoman Empire, but was split up after the Balkan revolt against Turkey, by the Treaty of London in 1913.  But the boundaries were not made clear by the treaty, leading to more struggle, and the current configuration.  The population of Macedonia is only 64% Macedonian.  It is 25% Albanian (in the north and west), and has many other ethnic groups (Serbs, Greeks, Bulgarians, Gypsies, and more).  The Macedonian Salad (a medley of fruit) was so-named because of the mixture in the population of Macedonia.

It is the size of Vermont.  It has beautiful mountain vistas.  It has a number of old medieval cities, with both Turkish and European sections.  It is largely Orthodox Christian.  Its churches are of Byzantine design, with a wide variety of very well done frescoes.  Its cities have cafes and a lot of street life.  It looks like a very interesting, and relatively laid back, place to visit.

One day.

The Passover Question 2008

Every year, new questions arise as you go through the Haggadah and think about the Passover story.  Here is this year’s question:

Background:  Pharaoh condemned all male Jewish children to death at the time of their birth and Moses was saved only by the rare and selfless act of his sister and the midwives.  Years later, persuaded by a now adult Moses (presumably only recently making his ethnicity known), with a little help from above, God permits the exodus of the Jews from Egypt.

Question:  Who were all those men who accompanied the Jewish women when they fled?

Book #2: The Birth of Israel, by Jorge Garcia-Granados

Sometimes books just seem to disappear. Once such book is The Birth of Israel by Jorge Garcia-Granados, formerly Guatemala’s Ambassador to the United States, and the country’s representative at the formation of the United Nations.  It is very difficult to locate a copy.

In 1947, Britain announced that it wished to terminate its mandate over Palestine and referred the matter to the UN. (The mandate originally was granted by the then-defunct League of Nations.) The UN in turn, under the direction of its first Secretary General, Trygvie Lie, formed the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP), one of whose eleven members was Guatemala, acting through Garcia-Granados. The UNSCOP members spent several months in Palestine in 1947 meeting with British and Jewish representatives. They attempted many times to meet with Arab representatives, but such meetings were rare and secret, because the Arab League and its member states refused to participate in any UNSCOP activities.

Garcia-Granados had no previous involvement in Jewish or Palestinian or Arab affairs. But he had a strong background in civil liberties as a member of the Guatemalan underground fighting against the previous dictatorship of that country. The book is a diary of his time with UNSCOP, both in the field, and when he got back to Lake Success, Long Island, in working with UNSCOP and the larger UN membership to forge a position and, after the declaration of independence of Israel, to develop an appropriate response.

UNSCOP was by and large a failure, due to the pre-determined positions of various of its members. The situation in what was then Palestine was no less confusing in 1947 than it is in 2008. Garcia-Granados was one of the UNSCOP members most in favor of partition, with a continuing UN trusteeship until there was some political stabilization. Any other road, he thought, would clearly lead to disaster. He felt great sympathy for the Jews as a result of the World War, felt great admiration for what he saw as Jewish development (agricultural, industrial and cultural) in what he viewed a basically barren land, and felt an understanding for the Jewish terrorists (namely the Irgun, and Menachem Begin, who he was able to meet under cloak-and-dagger circumstances) based on his Guatemalan experiences. He could not understand the Arabs, believed that they were too much under the sway of the Mufti (who had been a Hitler ally), and believed that they didn’t really care about the land in the way that they maintained that they did. He was therefore very unsympathetic to the Arabs’ overall position, although he was sympathetic to the position of individuals in all of the groups.

But as much as he disliked the Arab leadership, this paled before his absolute detestation of the British and the mandate leadership. From the way it stopped immigration, to the way it ignored the mandate rules originally established by the League, to its “holier than thou” attitude towards all non-Brits (and that is hard in the middle east), to the “police state” it was operating under the guise of the mandate, he hated it all.

The book is very readable, very interesting, and by giving the opinion of a complete outsider, who went into the position with only normal biases but came out strongly in favor of Jewish independence, and strongly despising virtually everything the British were doing in Palestine, it provides new insight into the difficult 1947-8 period.

I dare you to find a copy. But if you do, please read it.

Book #1: A Jesuit Off-Broadway, by James Martin, SJ

Once again, we go to “The Last Days of Judas Iscariot” by Stephen Adly Guirgis, now enjoying its run at the Forum Theatre in DC to an array of rave reviews (most recently, i.e. today, in the Washington City Paper).  Father James Martin acted as a “theological consultant” to Guirgis, to director Philip Seymour Hoffman, and to the full cast of the show in its New York Public Theater debut in 2004.  A Jesuit Off-Broadway tells the story of how that came to be, how integral to the play and its staging Martin became, how involved he became in the theatrical world and how theater relates to his own religious vocation, how the various cast members reacted to his participation, how their own religious or spiritual views were affected by the play, etc.  It is a very engaging book, eminently readable, and fascinating.

Last Days is clearly a Christian play.  Judas, who turned Jesus over to the authorities for 30 shekels, fell into deep despair, and committed suicide.  He is in purgatory and being tried.  But what is his crime?  Is it the selling out of Jesus?  Or is it his personal and overwhelming despair which led him to sin by taking his own life?  And with regard generally to one’s life, which is worse, committing an act that may be regarded as morally, ethically or legally wrong, or giving in to the regret or despair that may follow, and may end any attempt at personal redemption?  The question itself, of course is not a Christian question; it is much broader than that, but the context of the response in the play is clearly a Christian response.

As a non-Christian, how do I react to the play, and how do I react to the book?  Clearly, I don’t react in a religious sense.  I liked the play because its structure and its script are extraordinary, because the characters are all fascinating, and because of the human emotions involved.  I don’t have a history of thinking that Judas (assuming for a minute that the gospels tell a story with a degree of accuracy) was good or bad.  Obviously, he has been played throughout Christian history as a villain; that does not influence me one way or another.  He is currently undergoing his own form of resurrection as someone who, rather than selling out Jesus, may have been doing Jesus’ bidding to bring about exactly what transpired, which is so essential in Christian theology.  That, to me, is a very interesting theory; again, I have no emotional involvement.  Jesus’ final act (in the play) of attempting to break through to the semi-catatonic Judas to show him his love and forgiveness, for me, again is meaningless.  I take this play as great theater, but not with any religious meaning.

How different it is from the approach taken by Father Martin and by most of the cast members, both in NYC and here in DC, who are either religious Christians or former Christians who, in New York, include a number of pseudo-Buddhists, but whose religious framework remains Christian.  This, to me is a completely foreign religious framework.  (A Christian friend once told me that she understands how one be Jewish, except for one thing:  “If you don’t have the intervention of Jesus, how can you be saved?  What is the substitute?”  My answer was a simple, “Huh”?)

The fact that Martin and I are, to this extent, on different planets, did not detract from my enjoyment of, and appreciation of, the book.  Intellectually, I am interested in Christianity for all sort of obvious (at least I think they are obvious) reasons, so his many references to religious writers and writings and theological history, were very informative.  Also the fact that the actors could in so many instances relate to what he was giving them to read, or suggesting that they think about, was interesting (assuming that Martin was not engaged in the all too human activity of projecting his own thinking on to the cast members).  But, as my friend had this one little problem with Judaism, that only a Christian could have, I have problems with Christianity that only a non-Christian would have.  “Why”, I say to myself, “does anyone need a Jesus as part of a religious system?”  It is beyond me.  And, as I said “Huh?” to my Christian friend, I assume many of my Christian friends would say “Huh?” to me on this one.

At any rate, read the book.  Learn about Jesuits and Judas and Jesus and Philip Seymour Hoffman and Stephen Adly Guirgis, and Sam Rockwell and Eric Bogosian and the other members of this extraordinary cast.

And, Hannah, it seems to me that Father Martin acted as an exemplary dramaturg.  Have you ever thought about the priesthood?